Tom

[In the manuscript of Pudd'nhead Wilson,
in what is now Chapter 10, MT included five paragraphs in
which Tom, having just learned from Roxy that he is "black"
and a slave, tries to understand his self on the basis of
his racial ancestry. MT deleted the passage when he was
making his last revisions of the manuscript. It reflects
Tom's own thoughts, confused and inconclusive, not the
narrator's, but if MT had included it in the novel he would
have strengthed any case the novel might be making against
the idea that "blackness" was an inferior racial heredity.
(The manuscript is in The Morgan Library.)]

In his broodings in the solitudes, he searched himself
for the reasons of certain things, & in toil & pain
he worked out the answers:

Why was he a coward? It was the "nigger" in him. The
nigger blood? Yes, the nigger blood degraded from
original courage to cowardice by decades & generations
of insult & outrage inflicted in circumstances which
forbade reprisals, & made mute & meek endurance the
only refuge & defence.

Whence came that in him which was high, & whence
that which was base? That which was high came from either
blood, & was the monopoly of neither color; but that
which was base was the white blood in him debased by
the brutalizing effects of a long-drawn heredity of
slave-owning, with the habit of abuse which the possession
of irresponsible power always creates & perpetuates, by
a law of human nature. So he argued.